Lesson 2: How Are Glucose Levels Regulated in the Body?

What fuels us?October 2014

Lesson 2: How are glucose levels regulated in the body?

THE CHECKOUT LINE ANALOGY:

Present the students with the following scenario:

You are a manager at a grocery store. Almost always there are customers in the store and therefore there always needs to be at least one or two cashiers at the registers. The lines are usually only 1 or two people long. However, it is now 5 o’clock. People have left work to go shopping. Lines at the registers are now 6-7 people long.

What would you do as the manager?

Students should respond, to bring more cashiers to the registers.

How would this help?

Customers will get checked out more quickly. It will be more efficient.

Play devil’s advocate and ask? But the people will still pass through lines to buy food at the store. Why does it matter if it’s efficient or not?

The customers will not like to shop at the store because of the long lines. It will damage profit and reputation in the long run.

After students have responded to the last question, make the connection to glucose.

So having people wait in line is damaging to the store. Well glucose homeostasis works very similarly in the body. There is always glucose in the blood and therefore there are always transporters on body cells, just like there were always cashiers to take care of customers. However, when a person eats a meal, glucose levels in the blood rise, very similar to how the amount of customers in the store increased around 5o’clock. Now the permanent transporters that are always there can take up glucose, but this takes time. And just like the grocery store, this is damaging to the body. Therefore, the body signals cells to have more transporters to take up glucose from the blood, just as a manager would tell his/her employees to open up more registers for the customers. By having glucose taken up into the body efficiently, glucose will not damage the body.